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… jar, lid, jar, lid, jar, lid, jar, lid, jar, lid …Nadezhda
Mihailovna performed the synchronized routine moves.
There is a wonderful emptiness in her head.
It does not hurt, humiliate, despise, or denigrate.
Having scrambled out of bed, she puts on water to boil for
tea. Turns on the taps to fill the bathtub. She greets her
stocky, thickset frame in the large mirror. Her belly button
seems to her to be the most ludicrous of all – not a small,
lovely button, like the ones seen in TV commercials, but a
wrinkled troll’s eye – now closed, now open. She also has a
hard struggle with hair, it grows back in an instant,
especially under her arms.
Nadezhda Mihailovna pours her favourite bath gel in the
path of the water stream gushing into the tub. Whenever
she buys the product in the shop, the saleslady reminds her
that it is meant for men. But she likes the sharp,
stimulating fragrance, which envelops her long after she
has taken her bath. A bath is her third nirvana, immediately
after her bed and the woods. Sometime in the future, when
she can afford it, she will have only this trinity – bed,
woods, bath. Hope exists so that it may be fulfilled. Not so
very long ago she could not envisage even in her dreams
that she would have a bathtub.